


Working Through It

by telm_393



Category: Russian Doll (TV 2019)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21864760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Nadia, Alan, and the nature of their friendship.
Relationships: Nadia Vulvokov & Alan Zaveri
Comments: 9
Kudos: 89
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Working Through It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roguesgallery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roguesgallery/gifts).

“So how exactly did you meet Alan?” Farran asks without preamble (or asks again, more like, he’s been asking nearly every time she’s come by for the month since she and Alan stopped looping, shamelessly curious), and Nadia adjusts her grip on Oatmeal, who she plucked from the countertop. He’s pawing at her jacket.

She shrugs, which isn’t an answer, and then says, “We live in the same neighborhood, man,” which is also not really an answer, not to the question Farran’s actually asking.

The question Farran’s actually asking is when she and Alan became friends and, probably most importantly, why, and the answer is way too complicated.

Farran lets out a huff of laughter through his nose as he hands her a pack of cigarettes. She has to adjust Oatmeal to pay and take them, ignoring his meow of protest. Oatmeal doesn’t want to go with her, but that’s just too bad. She wants him at her apartment tonight. No reason. Maybe she’s just feeling affectionate. “Right,” Farran says.

“You really met him pledging a frat?” Nadia asks, because she just remembered that the other night while watching Alan make a house of cards like a refugee from the 1950s, and the thought seemed so ridiculous she almost laughed. Scratch that: she did laugh. Alan rolled his eyes.

“Yeah. Why’s that so hard to believe?”

Nadia snorts. “Why wouldn’t it be hard to believe? Alan the frat boy. Yeah fucking right.”

Farran laughs. “Full disclosure?” His smile turns uncomfortably bittersweet, and he admits, “He was kinda different back then.”

Nadia breezes past the awkwardness trying to settle into the space between them, and shrugs one shoulder. “Weren’t we all?”

When Nadia was in college, she was actively trying to make herself into who she is now. Who she was until recently. Both. Whatever. College was when she perfected her image, her porcupine thing, and figured out how to stop caring. Once she managed it, she settled into staying that person, the kind of person who didn’t get hurt and didn’t try to hurt people but didn’t try to help them all that much either, and for the next however many years she did her best to not change.

Probably the reason the universe stepped in, now that she thinks about it.

Who’s she kidding? She’s already thought about it. Nadia’s always been too interested in the meaning of life. In meaning at all. She’s tried not to be, obviously, because searching for meaning is torture, and yet. Sometimes it feels like her whole life can be explained with an  _ and yet. _

She wouldn’t (couldn’t?) change, Alan wouldn’t (couldn’t?) change. They were too comfortable being miserable, that’s just how it goes sometimes. How it doesn’t usually go is the universe deciding to make people face uncomfortable truths by killing them over and over again, but Nadia’s always had a weird life, and she doesn’t even have all the facts about exactly how special this situation with the universe even was.

For the first time, she wonders if there are any other people in the world who’ve been stuck looping together, watching their surroundings rot away. When she leaves the deli, grunting out a goodbye to Farran over her shoulder, she looks around at all the people rushing past her, stuck in their own little worlds, and wonders if any of them are looping right now.

It’s an interesting question. She’d like an answer, but there’s really no way to get one, so she gives up on it and just goes home.

Oatmeal twists out of her grip the second she opens the door to her apartment, jumping up on the couch and curling his little body around one of the pillows. At least he’s not trying to leave her, she thinks, and she feels a shot of disgust at the sadsack thought before realizing that she just went up the stairs with a cat in her arms and didn’t even worry about it. She considers the possibility that that’s some kind of victory. At the same time, she thinks about the multiple tumbles she took down those fucking stairs. What a death trap.

The entire world’s a death trap, but Nadia’s known that for a long time. She just knows it better now.

She grabs her laptop and sits next to Oatmeal and tries to forget about it. There's work she should be doing, e-mails that could do with answering, at least, but she doesn't try too hard to keep herself from getting distracted. She's just gotten into the groove of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole instead of actually doing anything worthwhile when there’s a knock on her door. It’s quick and hesitant, and Nadia is, as Ruth says,  _ hyperaware,  _ so she knows exactly who it is. She hopes he brought food at least, if he’s gonna interrupt her for no reason. “Come in,” she says, voice coming out raspy and mumbly and probably too low for half the human population to hear, but Alan hears like a fucking bat, so he opens the door.

“I brought food,” he says, and Nadia grunts in approval.

“Why’re you here?” Nadia asks instead of actually saying thank you, and Alan doesn’t answer, just closes the door and locks it, and then he’s peering over Nadia’s shoulder.

“Why are you reading about honeybees?”

“Ah, I think the question, Alan, is why aren’t  _ you  _ reading about honeybees? It’s climate change, man. Gotta educate yourself.”

Alan laughs, hesitant and a little confused, and stops reading over Nadia’s shoulder before she has to tell him to quit creeping behind her, moving to put the food on her coffee table. He kneels down next to the table and starts methodically taking the containers out of the bag, organizing them as he goes. Rice with rice, meat with meat, veggies with veggies. “Sure,” he says. 

Alan doesn’t even try to put food on Nadia’s kitchen table, since it's currently covered with shit. Nadia knows he worries about touching her stuff, even if he can’t help cleaning every available surface. Nadia lets him clean because she still feels bad about freaking out at him that one time. Not that they haven’t freaked out at each other since, but whatever.

She doesn’t ask why he came over again, because it’s another one of those complicated answers that are way too hard to give and even harder to listen to, and she mostly just asks that out of habit, like Farran asks how they met out of habit. “Farran’s still curious about us,” she informs Alan. “I mean, everyone’s still curious about us, for a given value of everyone,” because it’s not like they have that many people in their lives, “but he asks me why we’re friends every time I see him lately.”

Alan smiles down at the containers a little. “He’ll stop soon. He’s just curious, and it…hasn’t been that long.” It  _ hasn’t  _ been that long, has it? The thought makes Nadia almost uncomfortable. She hasn’t done the math on how long they were looping yet. Or she hasn’t thought of the math. She’ll get there. “He likes gossip. I, uh,” and here the smile disappears, “I just don’t make friends. Very easily.” He shrugs. “And...are we even friends?”

Nadia can feel herself pull a face. Weird question to ask when they see each other pretty much every day and literally saved each other’s lives. “What? Of course we’re friends. I have a key to your apartment.”

“Yeah, I didn’t give that to you,” Alan says mildly, and Nadia waves it off.

“You had five extras in a bowl, man, it was like a candy jar, y’know? You just take that shit, it’s right there for free.”

Alan rolls his eyes and gestures towards the Chinese take-out on the table, which means he’s finally finished organizing it and they can actually eat now. Nadia swipes some chow mein and chopsticks. Alan, after a moment of calculation, takes shrimp and a plastic fork because he’s afraid of chopsticks and the possibility that he’ll drop them, which means dropping food, which means the potential for stains, and that would just be  _ Titanic  _ levels of tragic.

“You have a key to my place,” Nadia points out.

“I did try to give that back like twenty times,” Alan reminds her, and Nadia shrugs.

“But I still gave it to you, man, that’s like, a big fucking deal for me.” She almost says  _ it’s not my fault you’re afraid of breaking into my apartment while I’m not there and doing something— _ something, that’s Alan’s exact word, he’s never told her what that something might be and she figures he doesn’t know, he’ll just cross that bad-person bridge when he comes to it—but decides against it.

He stopped trying to give the key back after she said to get over himself and let her have her moment of growing as a person and trusting someone, and it’d be her bad to put the idea in his head again. “So how’re we not friends?” She sounds more wounded than she’d like, but she was kinda assuming that Alan was operating under the same assumption that she was, that they were buddies forged out of a batshit situation and that wasn’t really up for debate.

“I mean, I’m not saying we’re not friends,” Alan says hastily.

“You literally just said that.”

“No, I asked if we  _ were  _ friends, because I feel like…I don’t know. It’s something different? I mean. Would we be friends? If it hadn’t happened. It’s an interesting question.”

“The answer’s obviously no, Alan,” Nadia says, because it’s not that interesting a question. The things they have in common aren’t the kinds of things people usually bond over. They’re not the kinds of things most people tell each other at all. Definitely not the kinds of things people like Nadia and Alan would tell each other.

Alan deflates a little at that, but doesn’t argue with her. “Yeah,” he mumbles.

“But it happened. In this universe, at least, it happened,” Nadia continues.

Alan groans. “Let’s not with the different universe thing tonight. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Ah, you’re no fun,” Nadia says, but she decides not to push the issue. Alan seems jittery, like he’s been drinking too much coffee, and she’s still figuring out when to push, but she knows when not to.

“I’m not the creative between us,” Alan tells her, almost a non sequitur, but she knows he’s trying to apologize for not wanting to talk about it tonight by flattering her, as if she blames him for deciding not to ruminate on something for once. They’re already on the time-loop topic, because of course they are. It’s not like it’s been that long since it all ended. It’s not like it’s actually ended. Here they are with each other, still.

“I dunno, I think wearing a checkered shirt in that shade of yellow and thinking it’s a good idea is pretty outside the box,” Nadia says lightly, deciding to change the topic because the nature of their relationship isn’t something she feels the need to think too deeply about, at least not tonight, and Alan’s officially distracted.

“Hey, this is a nice shirt. No one’s ever said a bad word against this shirt.”

Nadia snorts. “I have.”

“You have a problem with my outfits even though you dress like those cartoon characters who never change what they wear,” Alan accuses, and Nadia laughs.

“Still better than the checkered shirts. You look like a neurotic bumblebee.” Alan looks at her affronted. For flavor, she says, “Bzzzzz.”

Alan cracks a smile. “Sure.” He swallows and looks back down at his food. “I didn’t mean to imply we weren’t friends,” he says, going back to the original topic because he was not officially distracted, and Nadia sighs. “I just. Sometimes it feels like. More? I mean, it feels like a weird thing, that we wouldn’t’ve been friends if we hadn’t ended up thrown together by the universe. Does that make it less…” He trails off.

“Ehhh, that’s kinda a big question, buddy, but hard no. Obviously it’s  _ weird,  _ but we weren’t…” Nadia sighs. “I dunno. We weren’t thrown together by the universe as such. There was a reason for what happened to us, so I’d say it was more like meant to be.” In this timeline.

Alan nods. “Okay. I like that idea.”

Nadia snorts. “I know you do.” Why wouldn’t he like that idea? He’s probably spun it in his head already to make it something neat and correct instead of what it really is, which is insanely messy.

Nadia, for her part, doesn't know if she likes the idea much. It raises uncomfortable questions about what exactly the universe is playing at. She likes Alan, though, so she'll call that good enough for now. 

She and Alan fall into companionable silence, finishing up their food, and then Alan is meticulously inserting all their trash into a plastic bag, as if it won’t get messed up when he’s done due to its status as fucking trash. Oatmeal follows him, nudging at the plastic, and Alan looks ready to hiss at him, so Nadia clicks her tongue, which distracts both Oatmeal and Alan, who turn to look at her. “Y’know, I think my next game is gonna have a two-player option,” she announces, much to her own surprise, because she'd been keeping that idea to herself and hadn't even been thinking of work at all until she'd started talking about it, so it's kind of a mystery why that's what she decided to tell Alan to keep him from getting into what would've been no doubt a hilarious argument with her cat. 

Then Alan smiles, and Nadia realizes that that’s probably why she brought it up--she suspected it might make Alan smile. It’s a smile so open and bright that she feels uncomfortable looking at it, but it’s still something she wants to see. Maybe it’s not actually that pointless to think some more about the nature of their relationship. She pushes the thought to the back of her mind. She smiles back, though not on purpose.

“So that means it’ll be easier?” Alan asks eagerly, because he’s still got a chip on his shoulder about never finishing her other game.

“Eh,” is Nadia’s response. “Maybe, maybe not. But it’ll be easier to win, so. Do with that what you will.”


End file.
